Since returning from Madripoor, Laura had gotten used to waking up in the real world, not the tank or hanging upside down by her ankles. She’d gotten used to having another person asleep on her chest. She’d gotten used to b a person again, gotten used to her name on her little sister’s lips, to ignoring the voice in the back of her head telling her that everything they said is true and you never were a person in the first place.
That voice does stick around. It whispers things to her when fire reflects off a knife, when she smells chloroform, when Gabby’s sleeve slips and shows the scars that the younger girl doesn’t want her to worry about. It says weak and useless and weapon and it doesn’t stop, it never stops because she is the wicked-lovely-girl, she is a shadow of herself, she is a broken puppet passing as human.
The voice persists. It persists and it will ever stop, no matter what she does it will ver stop,and it is right it is right it is right-
But it is not.
It is not right, because she is not a machine, she is not Weapon-X-23-Property-of-the-Facility anymore, she is Laura-sister-of-Gabby-and-Bellona-and-Daken, Cousin-of-Megan and X-man-in-Training. She feels things and she loves others and she has a choice, always a choice, there is nothing standing between her and her desires. She can hug her sister and bicker with Julian over the radio and watch terrible old horror films with her cousin and dance with her girlfriends, if she wants to, because there is a choice.
She is still the wicked-lovely-girl. She is still the weapon, she is still the bringer of death, she is still a legend whispered through assassin’s homes that makes them shiver in their sleep. But she is also the woman who wins every drinking competition, who taught Gabby how to cheat at cards, who slept with her hand intertwined with Sooraya’s and her other circling Cessily’s wrist.
She has a name.
She will scream it from the rooftops, the name her mother gave her, LauraLauraLaura, because weapons do not have names but she does.
She screams and cries and fears and smiles and laughs and everything that people do.
Weapons do not weep. She does.